I have the privilege of working in a field where energy, industry, infrastructure and politics intersect. A space where every decision reverberates through the entire system, where each constraint exposes a long chain of underlying causes, and where official narratives often fail to capture the real mechanics at work.
It is not an easy domain to explain.
It falls apart the moment you approach it from a single angle.
To understand it, you need to stitch together the invisible links between prices, regulations, industrial capacities, grid constraints, political choices, geography and technical skills. That is the purpose of this series: to offer a clear, honest and systemic reading of a sector we think we understand, but which we too often observe in fragments.
When you look at Europe’s energy landscape through this wider lens, a pattern emerges.
A pattern that data reveals with a clarity the public debate no longer provides.
That pattern is the continent’s growing desynchronisation.
Germany is the clearest example.
It set out to become the laboratory of a rapid energy transition.
But the numbers tell another story: an industry under pressure, electricity prices structurally higher than those of its competitors, and large investments shifting to the United States, attracted by predictable energy costs and by regulatory stability that has become an industrial advantage.
Recent announcements follow the same sequence: partial closures, consolidation, defensive automation.
German engineering firms are not building the “factory of the future”; they are compensating for an energy-competitiveness gap that predates the gas crisis.
Germany is moving forward, but out of tempo — ambitious in words, constrained in reality.
Further east, the map shifts.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania do not have Western Europe’s industrial heritage or technical maturity, yet they now attract most major industrial projects.
The numbers are unambiguous: car manufacturing is relocating, investments in chemicals and batteries are being redirected, and national policies are readable and stable — three qualities investors value today as much as, and sometimes more than, low energy prices.
These countries are not chasing an image; they are building capabilities.
And they are doing it fast.
There, it is not decarbonisation that attracts capital, but political coherence.
In the southwest, the Iberian Peninsula illustrates another paradox.
Spain and Portugal have one of the strongest renewable potentials in Europe: highly competitive solar, growing authorised volumes, developers lining up.
But grids have not kept up.
Connection queues stretch beyond five years in some regions.
Gigawatts on paper, saturated cables on the ground.
The transition is moving forward on documents, but stalling on copper and steel.
And then there is France, a more ambiguous actor.
A country capable of producing low-carbon electricity at scale, yet unable to offer a stable trajectory.
A country whose energy policy bends with political cycles.
Where hydrogen ambitions exceed the maturity of the underlying industrial ecosystem.
Where grid projects move forward, but under constant strain.
France is neither ahead nor behind: it advances in a fragile equilibrium — one foot in sovereignty, the other in improvisation.
Taken separately, these contrasts suggest a fragmented continent.
But when the data is aggregated, another truth becomes evident:
the European transition suffers not from a lack of money, ambition or technology, but from a structural mismatch between four temporalities that never align:
– the political temporality, short, shifting, impatient;
– the industrial temporality, long, capital-intensive, irreversible;
– the infrastructure temporality, very long, shaped by regulation;
– and the human temporality of skills, slow, fragile, deeply dependent on people.
This is the blind spot of the European transition.
Objectives are announced, but infrastructures move at the pace of procedures, industries at the pace of CAPEX, technical teams at the pace of knowledge, and politics at the pace of electoral cycles.
The issue is not ambition.
It is synchronisation.
And it is precisely here that an overlooked actor becomes critical.
Technical enterprises.
Within this landscape, they play a role the public narrative systematically underestimates.
They have become the system’s translators: turning physical constraints into architectures, regulatory injunctions into concrete systems, and political ambitions into infrastructure capable of operating over decades.
They do not stand at the centre of the narrative, but they stand at the centre of the facts.
They implement what Europe decides — or what Europe delays.
This is where scarcity is shifting: away from resources, toward the capacity to assemble complex systems.
At the continental scale, I do not see failure.
I see misalignment.
Ambition rising, constraints tightening, infrastructures designed for another era, industries forced to accelerate, and skills that cannot renew at the pace of complexity.
The energy transition is not a vision problem.
It is an execution problem.
And above all, a synchronisation problem.
Data tells no other story.
It simply exposes what political noise obscures:
Europe does not lack energy, nor projects, nor willingness.
It lacks coherence, and it lacks time to rebuild it.